Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Holland Island sits in Chesapeake Bay, near Wenona, Maryland. The five-mile-long island was settled in the 1600s, and at one time had a population of 360 people and 70 buildings. Erosion ate away at the island, which sat on silt and clay, and the residents moved away between 1914 and 1918. The island’s church was moved in 1922, and only one house remained standing. It was built in 1888. For decades, the water ate away at the island, and the last remaining house finally collapsed in October of 2010. What’s left of the island is now a marsh, home to hundreds of sea birds. See pictures of the island and the house -and the cemetery- at the Baltimore Sun.

The Ballad of Holland Island House is a song and video by Lynn Tomlinson, with music written by Anna Roberts-Gevalt and Elizabeth LaPrelle. The animation was done by manipulating a thin layer of oil-based clay. It tells the story of the house, from its beginnings as a home for woodland creatures as a tree, then generations of people, then birds, and finally fish. (via io9)

Wong Fu Productions shows us how difficult it can be to scope someone out, as a guy tries to figure out how old a woman is. Why didn’t he just ask her if she’s in school? That wouldn’t have hurt any feelings. As it is, we get way too much information about her. But there’s a twist: as he is scoping her out, she’s also trying to figure him out! (via Daily Picks and Flicks)

What is the sound of an unborn baby clapping? There isn’t any, unless mom and the doctor sing along. Jen Cardinal underwent an ultrasound at 14 weeks in which they could clearly see the baby clapping his/her hands. The singing went on during a replay, and they toggled the ultrasound to make the song work while Dad took a cellphone video. So it’s a remix, but certainly a neat one. Jen says there were three claps in all during the procedure. (via Viral Viral Videos)

What happens when the elephant in the room confronts the skeleton in the closet? That’s far from the only turns of speech that go head-to-head in this sequence. Someone who is just learning English would be completely baffled! This award-winning video was made by Amanda Koh and Mollie Helms at Ringling College of Art + Design. (via Metafilter)

How would Rube Goldberg serve the Passover feast? In the most complicated way possible, of course! This seasonal device incorporates dominoes, fire, liquid, Tinker toys, origami, food, and plenty of imagery of Biblical proportions. Together, it tells the Passover story in moving parts. Students from the Faculties of Mechanical Engineering and Architecture and Town Planning at Technion in Israel made this contraption, using everything they had and more. There’s a behind-the-scenes video about how they did it, too. (via Digg)

Sunday, March 29, 2015

Why would you want to spend two minutes watching a guy saying meow and petting a kitten? Because Molly the Bengal kitten is so appealing, and quite talkative. This video is a lovely interlude in whatever you’re doing today. (via Daily Picks and Flicks)

The secret to immortality could be anything. Every time I show my kids
something I recall from my childhood, I also wonder if my parents
experienced memories of their own childhoods when they shared those
little things with me. As Terry Pratchett once wrote, “No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away…” This comic is from Lunarbaboon, of course.

This won’t make a bit of sense unless you are current on the TV series The Walking Dead. If you are, it’s pretty funny. I also have a feeling this will be completely obsolete after tonight’s episode. (Thanks, Chaco Daniel!)

If The WalkingDead were a comedy, it would be the 2009 film Zombieland. This mashup trailer tries to make that a reality, although they had to look really hard to find a few smiles and quasi-lighthearted moments from five years of The Walking Dead clips. Contains lots of gore. (via Uproxx)

The season five finale of The Walking Dead is tonight. The death watch poll is still open for your votes and opinions.

You say you never text while driving. You should still worry, because these teenagers are out there on the same roads you drive. While it happens to all age groups, teenagers are most likely to believe they are more competent than they really are. The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety issued a report on teen drivers who crash due to distracted driving. This video is a sampling of some of those crashes, which are mostly due to cell phone use, and the horrible habit of texting while driving. The very first thing any new driver should learn is the importance of constant observation. Traffic is like a complicated mass dance, with most of the dancers at less-than-professional level. So you have to not only see where you are going, but where everyone else on the road is, front, back, and sides, plus where they are going and how fast. The ability to map that dance takes constant observation and a lot of practice.

The video analysis detailed in the report found that distracted driving contributes to four times as many accidents as indicated through police reports. And you can see that many of these accidents will never involve a police report, as there is often no other car involved. Of course, what intrigued me was how they got so much video of crashes that weren’t staged. The explanation is in the report:

Lytx, a company that has been collecting data using in-vehicle event recorders (IVERs) for over a decade, provided the crash data. Their DriveCam system collects video, audio and accelerometer data when a driver triggers the device by hard braking, fast cornering, or an impact that exceeds a certain g-force. Each video is 12-seconds long, and provides information on the 8 seconds before and 4 seconds after the trigger. The system has a wide range of applications—families use them to help young drivers as they begin to drive independently, while over 500 commercial and government fleets employ them for fleet management.

Crashes examined in this study involved drivers aged 16-19 who were participating in a teen driving program that involved the use of a DriveCam system. Ltyx made 6,842 videos of crashes that occurred between August 2007 and July 2013 available for review. In order to reduce this number and to eliminate minor curb strikes from the analysis, those crashes in which the vehicle sustained forces less than 1g were excluded. Crashes in which the DriveCam equipped vehicle was struck from behind were excluded. Additional videos were excluded for other reasons (e.g., animal strikes, video problems, or the driver not being a teen). A total of 1,691 moderate-to-severe crashes met the inclusion criteria and were analyzed for the current study.

Such a system seems like it might be a good idea for probationary drivers, maybe for a year or until they prove their competence. (via Viral Viral Videos)

Paul Brennan is a sheep farmer in Carlow, Ireland. He has embraced modern techniques for managing an old profession. Instead of a sheepdog, Brennan uses a quadcopter named Shep (of course) to herd his sheep! You can see it works rather well. Bonus: music. (via Tastefully Offensive)

Friday, March 27, 2015

The way women have tried to stay fit sure has changed in the last 100 years. One thing you must remember is that the first couple of decades in this video were the days that women spent a huge amount of time carrying buckets of water from the well to the house, washing diapers by hand, and hauling firewood or coal for the heating stove. They deserved a good stretch! Later, when modern appliances and office jobs replaced household drudgery, we had to get more serious about fitness. The video was made by Benenden health to celebrate the company’s 100th anniversary. (via Buzzfeed)

When they said, “The bus is lost,” that didn’t mean the driver took a wrong turn. Heavy rains have left Brazil with massive drainage problems and flooding. On a stretch of the Trans-Amazon highway between Rurópolis and Itaituba, rushing water undercut the road’s foundation. On Tuesday, a bus was recorded as it was swallowed by the collapsing road, and is then washed away in the floodwaters. Fortunately, all the passengers got off the bus in time, and no one was injured. The story is in Portuguese with an English translation by Google. (Thanks, Ken Berken!)

Nigel Hayes of the Wisconsin Badgers is a 6’7” elite basketball player, but you have to remember that he’s also a 20-year-old college student. During a press conference last week, he had a little fun with the stenographers that record everything for press releases, throwing out this quote:

“Before I answer that question, I would like to say a few words: cattywampus, onomatopoeia and antidisestablishmentarianism. (Laughs).”

During another press conference a couple of days later, Hayes was given an opportunity to repeat that stunt for the stenographers. He chose the word “syzygy,” but was also impressed with Debra Bollman’s appearance. And just like a 20-year-old college student, he remarked about it to his teammate while forgetting the microphone was hot. And then became quite embarrassed. His adorable reaction makes the whole sequence golden. Another thing you might learn in college besides big words: Pride goeth before a fall. (via reddit)

Thursday, March 26, 2015

Every year when marshmallow Peeps go on sale in the Easter candy aisle, people let their imaginations run wild with them. Chicks and bunnies end up re-enacting famous scenes from TV, movies, art, literature, and history in dioramas. They go to public competitions and win prizes, and make us all smile. Some of them even go into space! Here’s a roundup of some of the ways Peeps participate in space exploration that I posted at mental_floss.

A stop-motion tourist in Rome gets to travel 2,000 years back in time to see how the ancient Romans built Trajan’s Column. The Column is a tower constructed of 29 huge slabs of marble, with spiral stairs carved out of the inside of each slab. The engineering genius required to assemble such a tower was unprecedented.

The a cappella group Six13 is out with their pop culture parody song for Passover, as they take the holiday uptown! Passover begins Friday, April 3rd, but the song is here today to coincide with the release of their new album Six13, Vol. 6: Thirteen. The lyrics are at the YouTube page. Don’t be slavin’, just nosh! (via Time)

Since 1985, the Walt Disney Pictures logo that begins their movies always features a castle with a shooting star arching over it. It was the same logo for ten years, and then for Toy Story in 1995, they altered it a bit for that particular movie. In the 20 years since then, the logo has been customized for most of the movies (the Toy Story version became their default for Pixar films), while keeping the two basic elements. This video shows us the logos in front of 39 Disney films, and how they mesh with their subject matter. I also found out that there are a ton of Disney films I haven’t seen. (via Geeks Are Sexy)

If the internet were a high school, the people in them would be websites. And they’d all have their quirks. Google is the teacher, and the students include the ADHD twins (Vine and Twitter), the jock (Facebook) who’s dating the cheerleader (Buzzfeed), the troublemaker (reddit), and quite a few nerds. Cracked, which produced this video, apparently skipped class that day. Miss Cellania was, no doubt, the mousy girl no one paid attention to. (via Viral Viral Videos)

Being a citizen of the internet makes it very likely that you enjoy cats and occasionally enjoy a pizza. The problem is that cats enjoy pizza, too, and cats have no concept of resisting temptation, neither do they have respect for stupid human “rules.” My husband watched this and said, “Why don’t they push the cat away from the pizza?” Duh, these people are too busy recording a video for that! (via Tastefully Offensive)

Eggs go on sale the week before Easter, so you may as well stock up and do something with those little protein-packed symbols of spring. Not all of the recipes in a list I posted at mental_floss contain eggs, but they are all creative new ideas for spicing up your Easter feast, party, or holiday snacking. And save some for me!

Looks like Wile E. Coyote has been up to his old tricks again! Who else
would drop a vintage safe from some height right onto a parked car?
You’d be forgiven if you thought this must be an art installation, and
you’d be right, too. It’s a promotional gimmick on the streets of Limerick, Ireland, for Grandmother’s Giant Journey, a performance that is part of the Giant Saga by the French art company Royal de Luxe (previously
at Neatorama). Grandmother will arrive in Limerick September 5th to
stay through the 7th. Well, according to the legend, she will actually
fall from the sky, but I wouldn't worry about any cars being crushed -at
least none accidentally. (via reddit)

This is probably some kind of enrichment activity for red pandas in the Maruyama Zoo in Sapporo, Japan, but it ends up as pure entertaining cuteness. They slap slices of apple onto the glass windows of Eita’s enclosure and he has to get them himself. The apples taste so good after all that effort! (via Daily Picks and Flicks)

Voldemort, the bad guy from the Harry Potter series, is out with his version of “Uptown Funk.” Elijah Thomas is Voldemort, and the cast includes musicians, dancers, and a group of cosplayers from Brigham Young University. The lyrics are at the YouTube page. (via The Daily Dot)

As part of their Color for All campaign, Valspar Paint invited a few colorblind people to try the glasses out and got their reactions to seeing vivid colors for the first time. It was quite emotional for them, and yes, they got to keep the glasses. Valspar also offered them to some commenters at YouTube who shared their stories. (via Viral Viral Videos)

Jeff Minetti of Philadelphia is getting married, but first, there’s the bachelor party. Joey DiJulio of Seattle was invited, although he has never met Jeff or any of his friends -he just got put into the email loop by mistake. (via The Chive) http://thechive.com/

Buzzfeed gives us some facts about the standards of male beauty around the world, and dressed them up with male models. The men are all gorgeous, but the text is a bit depressing, as standards of attractiveness tend to become homogenized in favor of Caucasian looks. There are good looking guys everywhere! (via Viral Viral Videos)

Sunday, March 22, 2015

Sam and Friends was Jim Henson’s first TV show, debuting in 1955. This episode is from 1961, and stars Kermit, who was not yet a frog, but already had his distinctive look and, of course, voice. He talks to Chet Huntley and David Brinkley in puppet form. (via mental_floss)

I have never, ever worked anywhere where the boss decided it was a good idea to have an office pet. Some offices have aquariums, but that’s always just a decoration for clients or customers. However, over the past few years (while I’ve been working from home), many office managers are exploring ways to make the workday more pleasant for their staff. Whether this is to increase production or to make employees deal better with the fact that they haven’t had a raise in years is anyone’s guess. If you decide to try this, your best bets are aquarium fish or a cat. Don’t opt for an alligator snapping turtle. (via Tastefully Offensive)